Abstract
Over the past decade, evidence has accumulated that performance in attention, perception, and memory-related tasks are influenced by the distance between the hands and the stimuli (i.e., placing the observer’s hands near or far from the stimuli). To account for existing findings, it has recently been proposed that processing of stimuli near the hands is dominated by the magnocellular visual pathway. The present study tests an implication of this hypothesis, whether perceptual grouping is reduced in hands-proximal space. Consistent with previous work on the object-based capture of attention, a benefit for the visual object in the hands-distal condition was observed in the present study. Interestingly, the object-based benefit did not emerge in the hands-proximal condition, suggesting perceptual grouping is impaired near the hands. This change in perceptual grouping processes provides further support for the hypothesis that visual processing near the hands is subject to increased magnocellular processing.
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Notes
It is worth noting that the use of red stimuli in the current experiment will not inhibit M-pathway activity. Indeed several previous studies that reported increased M-pathway contribution used displays that could include a red stimulus (e.g., Goodhew et al. 2014; Gozli et al. 2014; Kelly and Brockmole 2014). It is only when the light source is diffuse (i.e., the entire background of the monitor) that the M-pathway is inhibited by red light. In the single-cell recording studies that initially demonstrated the effect, when light sources were focused enough such that they did not cover the surround portion of the receptive fields, no inhibition was found (Wiesel and Hubel 1966).
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Huffman, G., Gozli, D.G., Welsh, T.N. et al. Hand position influences perceptual grouping. Exp Brain Res 233, 2627–2634 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4332-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4332-7